John Bolton is once again in the spotlight. For two decades we’ve been charmed by his Cold War-style bellicosity. And now he joins James Comey and Leticia James as the first real targets of Trump’s vendetta indictments.
But unlike the Comey and James cases — which are end-to-end bullshit and everybody knows it — Bolton’s day in court will be more complicated. There is, in fact, a real case against him, and he might actually be facing prison time. Try to resist the schadenfreude.
Yes, the indictment is a textbook example of politically motivated. Yes, Trump publicly ordered his pet attorney general, Pam Bondi, to make it happen, which is wildly illegal. Yes, Trump has publicly castigated Bolton, which was once a surefire way to get a case thrown out of court.
But apparently, a case can be politically motivated and still be competently put-together, a rarity in the Bondi DOJ. And that’s a problem for Bolton.
It was just a few months ago I was writing about the FBI raid on Bolton’s house. At the time it seemed like a Keystone Kops shtick, ineptly directed by Kash Patel. It seemed likely to produce the sort of indictment that judges and grand juries alike have since learned to laugh out of court. I assumed that they’d gotten a search warrant on some flimsy pretext, then gone into the house hoping to find something incriminating. In Russia, they do this all the time.
But it turns out they were looking for something specific, which means they had convinced a judge there was probable cause, a nicety we don’t always see from today’s FBI. They were playing this one by the book.
And what they found was some rather damning evidence about Bolton’s time in the first Trump administration. Apparently, even as he ran around the world as Trump’s national security advisor, he was feverishly gathering material for his tell-all memoir, which he was evidently keen to publish before the 2020 election. The book, The Room Where It Happened, came out in July of that year. It was an instant bestseller, a big payday for Bolton, and a ketchup-throwing moment for Trump.
But for the whole eighteen months that Bolton worked for the White House, he was allegedly sending daily dispatches to his wife and daughter for safekeeping. These unsecure emails, which recounted his activities at the highest levels of the global security establishment, were ultimately hacked by Iran. Which is evidently how the FBI came to know of them.
The information Bolton was sending home was at best highly sensitive, and at worst highly classified. But either way, he knew full well that a lawyer with his resumé, not to mention his extensive national security experience, was expected to know better. The prosecutors call that “consciousness of guilt,” and there was a bunch of it in the emails.
If this sounds like the sort of case Democrats might have wanted to bring against Bolton, that’s because it was. Bolton was, in fact, investigated under Biden, back when real professionals were in charge. At that time, prosecutors decided against indicting, presumably because there were too many gray areas in the case to make for an airtight jury verdict. Which is how Bolton became the latest in a long line of Republicans to go un-indicted by Democratic administrations, despite flagrant criminal behavior. But we digress.
One of the many ironies of the Bolton case is how a regime so utterly lawless is now leaning on the rule of law — complete with real evidence — to make a case they’d otherwise be happy to conjure from thin air.
Another irony is that of all Trump’s vendetta indictments so far, the only one with any legal substance at all is the one against — wait for it — a Republican.
Trump is, of course, bipartisan in his hatreds and grievances, and his grudge against Bolton is well-known. Still, imagine his excitement to hear that real criminality is being alleged.
Still more irony. Poor Pam Bondi is under a ton of pressure to produce indictments for the Dear Leader, but bringing charges against Democrats is really hard — they don’t give a corrupt attorney general anything to work with. Yes, there are corrupt Democrats, but generally the most dirt you can get on them is on the level of unpaid parking tickets. At the Adam Schiff level, they’re all squeaky clean.
Republicans, on the other hand, are a target-rich environment for any prosecutor, even the inept ones. If Trump were to sic Bondi on Republicans he doesn’t like — and there are plenty — the cases would build themselves, with actual evidence of actual wrong-doing.
In the meantime, Bolton is up against real prosecutors — the ones, dare we say, who have yet to be fired — as opposed to the Bondi-appointed dimwits who can’t even get the paperwork right on the Comey and James cases.
The good news for Bolton is that the dimwits are already screwing up the case anyway, starting with the chief dimwit, Trump himself, whose public spews about Bolton have already contaminated any conceivable jury.
Trump also stupidly rushed the case. In his now-famous message to Bondi, he demanded action on indictments. While the Bolton case was much further along than the nonsensical cases against Comey and James, there were still plenty of loose ends, mostly having to do with what was and wasn’t classified material. This might have taken several more months to sort out, but Trump put pressure on Bondi, and Bondi put pressure on the prosecutors. And they all moved forward with an indictment they weren’t ready to bring.
It's exactly those sorts of loose ends that a good defense lawyer thrives on, and Bolton has a good one indeed. Abbe Lowell, who most recently represented Hunter Biden, knows well the kinds of clowns he’s up against, and he has a history of making them look foolish. He also has several decent legal arguments to make in Bolton’s defense, any one of which could lead to a jury acquitting him. Which is probably why the Democrats declined to indict Bolton when they had the chance. Not because he wasn’t guilty, but because they couldn’t convict.
This all means that Bondi has an excellent chance of blowing the case, which Trump would have trouble digesting. I’m sure there’s a job waiting for her at Fox.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know how this will play out. A judge could throw out the case altogether, just based on the pre-trial publicity and Trump’s public utterances. Or it could settle quietly, with some face-saving deal that lets Bondi keep her job and Bolton his freedom. Or it could go to court, which might have enormous entertainment value, especially if Trump does something Trumpy.
If anybody deserves to have his life ruined, Bolton would be a good choice, but even he doesn’t deserve this. Once upon a time, a competent DOJ, working for a competent administration, might have pursued his case by the letter of the law. His guilt or innocence would be determined in court, and would stand outside of politics, and certainly outside the wrath of a demented dictator. But that was then.
Now, the stage is set for a highly public food fight — a perfect storm of corrupt intent, legal complexity, and political hair-pulling. And we don’t even have a judge assigned yet.
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